Vladimir Putin has signalled that his country’s war with Ukraine may be ‘coming to an end’, as the Russian president again blamed the West for prolonging the fighting through military support to Kyiv.

Speaking after Victory Day events in Moscow, Putin said on Sunday that he was ready to hold direct talks with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Moscow or a neutral country.

His comments come as Russia and Ukraine observe a short three-day United States-backed ceasefire and continue prisoner-swap discussions. However, broader peace talks remain stalled, and the two sides continue to carry out attacks against each other.

Ukrainian officials said on Sunday that Russian attacks left at least three people dead, and that close to 150 combat engagements had occurred on the front lines in the previous 24 hours.

The remarks also reflect mounting pressure on both sides after more than four years of war that has devastated parts of Ukraine and strained Russia’s economy.

What did Putin say?

“I ⁠⁠think that the matter is coming to an end,” Putin told reporters of the Russia-Ukraine war, Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.

The Russian leader, however, added he would be willing to meet Zelenskyy only after the terms of a peace agreement had already been settled. The Kremlin had rejected US President Donald Trump’s August 2025 offer to hold a trilateral meeting with Zelenskyy, Putin and Trump.

“This should be the final point, not the negotiations themselves,” Putin said after the Victory Day, which marks Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 in World War II.

The Russian president said he would be willing to negotiate new security arrangements with Europe, and that his preferred negotiating partner would be Germany’s former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Schroeder has faced heavy criticism in Germany for his close relationship with the Russian president. The former German chancellor became chairman of a controversial German-Russian gas pipeline consortium after leaving office in 2005.

Russia has accused the West of expanding the NATO security alliance to encircle it, and Putin has given this as one justification for Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He framed the NATO expansion as a “matter of life and death” for Russia.

Asked after the parade if Western military support for Ukraine had gone too far, Putin said, “They started ratcheting up the confrontation with Russia, which continues to this day.”

Putin also said Western countries had “spent months waiting for Russia to suffer a crushing defeat, for its statehood to collapse. It didn’t work out”.

“And then they got stuck in that groove, and now they can’t get out of it,” he added.

Why is Putin talking about ending the war now?

The Russian president’s suggestion that the end of the war may be approaching is being driven more by global “hope and optimism” than by a sober reading of his words, according to analyst Keir Giles.

Giles, a fellow at Chatham House, noted that there have been “plenty of promises over the last 18 months that the end of the war was imminent”, none of which “turned into reality”, he told Al Jazeera.

He cautioned against interpreting Putin’s comments as a reliable indicator that the conflict is genuinely nearing resolution.

“The best we can hope for is that now Putin realises that Russia is not in fact winning the war,” he opined, adding that Putin may therefore be “more willing to suspend it than previously when he rejected all of the peace efforts of Trump because he believed that Russia could gain more from fighting on than from Trump enforcing a ceasefire”.

The war has killed tens of thousands of people on both sides, left swathes of eastern Ukraine ⁠⁠in ruins, and drained Russia’s $3 trillion economy. Western-led sanctions have also impacted Russia’s economy.

Moscow’s relations with Europe are worse than at any time since the depths of the Cold War. While Russia controls nearly one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, it has struggled to fully capture the eastern Donbas region, while Ukraine’s counteroffensives have failed to reclaim major occupied areas.

Putin’s remarks also coincide with renewed US-led efforts to push both sides towards at least temporary ceasefires and humanitarian agreements. Trump on Friday publicly backed the latest three-day truce, saying he hoped it could become “the beginning of the end” of the war.

The US president placed ending the war in Ukraine at the heart of his 2024 re-election bid, even claiming he could halt the fighting within 24 hours of taking office again.

A deal has proved elusive as Russia has insisted on taking over the entire Donbas region and has opposed Ukraine’s entry into NATO, while Kyiv has refused to concede any territory and has demanded that security guarantees be part of any deal.

Russia claims Ukraine has committed more than 1,000 violations since the three-day truce came into effect on Saturday.

At least three people have been killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine in the past 24 hours despite a three-day ceasefire announced by US President Donald Trump that came into effect on May 9.

Regional authorities on Sunday reported one death each in Ukraine’s Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kherson regions.

In the Kherson region, a 58-year-old woman was killed in a Russian drone attack on the village of Nezlamne on May 9, according to the Kherson Oblast Prosecutor’s Office.

Governor Oleksandr Prokudin confirmed the death on Telegram, saying the woman had been struck while walking down the street. Seven people, including a child, have also been injured across the region in drone or artillery attacks since early Saturday, he added.

Ivan Fedorov, the governor of the southeastern Zaporizhia region, said one person had been killed and three others injured by artillery and drone attacks in the past 24 hours.

In the northeastern Kharkiv region, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said eight people, including two children, were injured in drone attacks on the city of Kharkiv and nearby settlements.

In the region of Dnipropetrovsk, a 46-year-old woman was killed and another person injured on Saturday in the Mezhivska community near the city of Synelnykove, according to Governor Oleksandr Hanza. On Sunday, a child was injured in a nearby area, he said.

Kyiv’s air force said Russia had launched 27 long-range drones at Ukraine overnight, a lower figure than in recent days, and that air defences had intercepted all of them.

Ukraine’s General Staff said in its daily morning report that 147 battlefield clashes had taken place along the front line in the past 24 hours.

Russia’s accusations

Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Sunday that Ukraine had committed more than 1,000 ceasefire violations by launching drone and artillery attacks against its troops and civilian targets in multiple Russian regions.

The ministry said the attacks were recorded in Russia-annexed Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, as well as the Russian regions of Belgorod, Kursk, Kaluga, Rostov, and Krasnodar. Russian forces said they had shot down 57 Ukrainian drones.

“Despite the declaration of a ceasefire, Ukrainian armed formations carried out strikes using unmanned aerial vehicles and artillery on the positions of our troops, as well as on civilian targets,” the ministry said. Russia’s military had “responded in kind”, it added.

Two people were reported injured by Ukrainian shelling in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region, according to Vladimir Saldo, the Moscow-installed head of the area.

San Francisco, United States – Greer Dove’s days are packed with studying business and finance, as well as doing administrative work at college, along with caring for her eight-year-old daughter with special needs. But once a week, Dove, a single mother, makes sure to drop in at the food bank in California’s Marin County to pick up vegetables, fruit and other food. Along with the federal government’s food benefits, they keep her housing running.

“We need this so we can keep functioning at a high level,” she says. “She loves fruit, so I make sure to get it,” she says of her daughter.

Dove, who is also looking for a full-time job, has worked in restaurants, event management, retail, television shows, office administration and payroll over the years. But she has been on the federal government’s Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) for six years, and with the food bank, for more than three years. Before she got food benefits, Dove fed her daughter all she had and skipped meals or looked around for snacks in the offices she worked at to get her through the day.

United States President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), passed in June, cut SNAP benefits by more than $186bn over the next 10 years to make up for extending cuts to income tax. This could lead to more than 3 million people nationwide, and 665,000 recipients in California, losing such food benefits, according to estimates.

“This will bring a series of cuts that collectively present an existential threat to food benefits,” says Andrew Cheyne, managing director of government relations and public affairs at the County Welfare Directors Association of California.

California’s proposed billionaire tax, which seeks to impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the assets of the state’s more than 200 billionaires to make up for the funding gap created by the OBBBA, got more than 1.5 million signatures in April. It is likely to be on the ballot for the November midterm election.

While most of the nearly $100bn expected to be raised through the tax will go towards filling the gap in health insurance created by the OBBBA, 10 percent will be used to make up for the retrenchment in food benefits.

In California, where more than 5.3 million people, more than any other state, receive food benefits, the impacts of the cuts began to be felt in April when 72,000 immigrants started losing benefits. June onwards, nearly 600,000 recipients will be screened for work eligibility. Recipients, including those who are homeless, seniors, foster youth and veterans, will have to work, study or volunteer to receive food benefits. Failing the screening to meet work requirements for three months will lead to their food benefits being cut.

Brian Galle, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the tax measure’s authors, says that in California, the state that introduced gig work, “jobs are increasingly precarious. You may find enough work or not. You may get tips or not. But nutrition needs are steady.”

Making impossible choices

On a recent Friday morning, new members lined up to enrol at a whitewashed, bunting-festooned La Ofrenda food bank in San Francisco’s Mission district. The food bank doles out fresh vegetables, fruit and bread that have been donated by large grocery stores once those products neared expiration date.

Gladys Lee had taken a 45-minute train ride after a friend told her about it. Lee worked at downtown San Francisco’s Hyatt hotel as a room cleaner for three decades until a back injury meant she could not push the heavy cleaning carts any more and had to leave. After seven years of struggling to find work, food was getting scarce, and Lee found her way to La Ofrenda. She packed what she could into a carton and held it in her arms for the train ride back.

Food benefit rolls have shrunk by more than 3.3 million nationally in the six months from July 2025, when the OBBBA was enacted, to January 2026.

In California, the rolls of Calfresh, as food benefits are known in the state, shrank by 288,000 or 6 percent from July 2025 to February 2026, according to analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington, DC-based think tank. This reduction in rolls happened even before the OBBBA cuts began.

Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, wrote in a recent essay that the shrinking of SNAP rolls reflected an ebullient economy and buoyant job growth.

“The drop in SNAP recipients affirms that many Americans are moving from welfare to work,” she wrote. “It is no secret that Trump’s massive tax cuts and deregulation efforts are unleashing robust, private sector-led economic growth, which are fueling trillions in investments, booming wage growth”.

But unemployment remained stable at about 4.4 percent since July 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, while SNAP rolls shrank.

“This last time we saw such a steep, quick decline, other than during natural disasters, is three decades ago when welfare reform was enacted,” says Dottie Rosenbaum, senior fellow and director of  Federal SNAP Policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Nationally, SNAP rolls shrank by 8 percent, while in California, they shrank by 5.5 percent, in part because the work eligibility requirements were delayed until June, while some other states have already implemented them.

At La Ofrenda, Roberto Alfaro, executive director of the nonprofit Homey, says he started the food bank when food costs went up during the pandemic. They have stayed high, he says. Now he sees people doing day jobs and night jobs and coming for food when they have paid rent.

“People are making impossible choices,” says Keely O’Brien, a policy advocate at the Western Center for Law and Poverty.

While California is the world’s fourth-largest economy, growth has come with a soaring cost-of-living crisis.

“With rising housing and utility costs, few households can dedicate that much of their income towards food,” O’Brien says.

The OBBA has also shifted the administrative cost of meeting work eligibility requirements to states, and beginning next year, part of the cost of SNAP will also fall on states.

“To make requirements more stringent, you are creating more government, more bureaucratic logjam,” says Jaren Sorkow, state director for the Children’s Defence Fund.

This has already led to a 51 percent drop in SNAP rolls in Arizona, which has begun implementing the OBBBA cuts, according to data by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Making something from nothing

Several measures to counter the $100bn gap in funding for health insurance and food benefits created by the OBBBA have been floated in California. The biggest of these is the one-time 5 percent tax on those with assets of more than a billion dollars. The tax will raise $100bn, its authors estimate.

As it seems set to be voted on in the November election, it faces mounting opposition from the state’s tech entrepreneurs who have funded measures to undercut the tax.

Tech entrepreneurs have called it an economic 9/11, saying taxing their assets, including shareholding in startups, will lead to a flight of capital and innovation from the state. Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google Inc, now spends a week in Nevada and a week in his Bay Area offices and has spent more than $57m on opposing the billionaire tax. He has backed two measures that undercut the billion tax, which have also received 1.4 million and 1.5 million signatures and are also set to be on the ballot for the November election.

One of these measures prohibits future taxes on personal property, including financial assets, savings and retirement accounts, as well as intellectual property. The other would increase audits of taxpayer-funded programmes, and includes language that would essentially invalidate the billionaire tax.

In a recent statement to The New York Times, Brin said, “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”

The coalition of unions backing the billionaire tax is bracing for the fight ahead. “We expect to be outspent,” says Kris Cuaresma-Primm, director of partnerships for the coalition that is backing the billionaire tax. “We will keep communicating to people that there is a tidal wave of pain coming from the cuts, and we want to reclaim the losses from the OBBBA.”

Giulia Varaschin, senior tax policy adviser at the International Tax Observatory, who recently coauthored a study on wealth taxes, says there is little academic evidence that such taxes cause the wealthy to leave at a notable scale. “There is only a marginal flight with very little, if any, economic impact,” she says.

The study, coauthored with the economist Gabriel Zucman, who supports the California billionaire tax, did find that wealth taxes had not raised as much revenue as estimated in several European countries and became less popular as a result.

Varaschin says this was because these taxes were levied on a larger set of the wealthy, which included homeowners or small businesses, rather than the ultra-rich or billionaires. The taxpayers could hardly afford to pay it, and the government made exemptions instead. These taxes also did not touch assets, where much of the wealth of the ultra-rich lies, Varaschin says.

The California tax remedies this by taxing only billionaires and taxing assets, including shares in companies.

Daniel Shaviro, Wayne Perry professor of taxation at New York University, says, “Traditionally, these taxes can be hard to enforce because tax administration don’t want to go after these people.”

Even if it passes, “The governor could just say this is not a high priority for him and not enforce it,” Shaviro says, referring to Governor Gavin Newsom, who has opposed the tax.

But Primm says, “The governor is out of touch with Californians on this”.

Newsom is in the last year of his last term as governor. However, nearly all the candidates running for the June 2 primary for governor, except billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running as a progressive Democrat, also oppose this measure. While some have said this will lead to a flight of capital, others say the spending plan does not include expenses for education, which was not cut in the OBBBA.

Greer Dove, who gets food through Calfresh and the San Francisco Marin Food Bank for herself and her daughter, says the looming food benefit cuts are worrying. “The anxiety of it all is adding up. I could be next.”